Youth serves Team Europe

PARKER — Charley Hull did what any 17-year-old golf fanatic would when standing next to Paula Creamer.

She asked her to sign a golf ball.

The fact that this scene played out on the edge of the 14th green after Hull had put a 5-and-4 drubbing on one of America’s most popular players seemed almost incidental to the youngest player to ever suit up at the Solheim Cup.

Hull, who put the first point of Sunday’s singles on the board for the winning Europeans, spent the week treating one of the biggest events in women’s golf like another walk through her home course back in Kettering, England. She closed out her Solheim debut in a match the Americans desperately needed to win to mount any sort of comeback — a matchup they thought they’d have the edge in, given Creamer’s experience and Hull’s lack of it.

“I didn’t really feel that nervous, to be honest,” Hull said. “Because this is how I always look at golf: I’m not going to die if I miss it. Just hit it, and find it, and hit it again.”

Europe’s six rookies combined to go 12-5-2. America’s four first-timers went 2-7-4.

Thanks, in part, to two surprising points from the player who was born in 1996, Europe won the Solheim Cup for the first time on U.S. soil.

Hull, who said she got the ball signed for a friend back in England, made her name back home as an amateur and this year joined the European tour where she had four second-place finishes in her first eight starts.

On Sunday, she got a rematch with Creamer and just kept going.

The list of memorable shots went like this: 18-foot birdie putt on No. 3; 45-foot birdie putt on No. 6; approach to 8 feet on No. 7; bump and run to tap-in range on No. 12.

Leading by five and trying to put the match away, Hull’s approach shot on 13 banked down the contour of the green and funneled to 4 feet. Creamer was bunkered off to the side and the match looked like it was over. But Creamer holed out from the sand. No problem. Hull stepped up and calmly sank her putt to halve the hole with her fifth birdie. One hole later, the match was over.